CyberAlert -- 05/14/1996 -- ABC's Skewed Ear

ABC's Skewed Ear

One item today:

ABC finds a conservative America,
but Peter Jennings impugns those who believe in requiring immigrants to
conduct business in English.

For the next two weeks ABC's World News Tonight will air a series titled
"Listening to America." ABC sent ten reporters across the
country to learn what people are thinking. On Monday (May 13) they ran a
preview/overview piece narrated by Peter Jennings. Remember that last week
on Larry King Live Jennings denied ABC has a liberal bias.

Monday
night Peter Jennings reported: "We found bigotry and resentment. And
we listened to some Americans who felt threatened by other people because
they were different."
The supporting soundbite for that assertion? A
middle-aged white man in a cowboy shirt sitting beside a woman, presumably
his wife, with a field behind them. Immediately following Jennings'
statement above, the man said: "If you want to come here and be an
American and be in America, learn the language, get a job, get a Social
Security number and get the better way of life." Now that's one
threatened and bigoted guy.

Otherwise, however, it appears ABC has discovered a conservative country.
Here are three quotes from Jennings:
-- "When we listened to people we found that
not very many of them trusted the federal government to do the right thing
most of the time. This owner of a small lumber mill in Maine was fairly
representative."
[Lumber mill owner: "They seem to get down to Washington, get in all
these meeting rooms, in their ivory towers and seem to kind of forget
about us back home trying to make a dollar."]

--
"We were struck by the enormous emphasis people placed on family
life. Everywhere we went we heard time and again about the value of the
family. In the Pacific Northwest, for example, our John Donvan found it to
be a yardstick for success."

--
"You will hear, in the next two weeks, how concerned people are with
what they call the moral decline in the nation. In parts of the South,
Erin Hayes found profound concern about how difficult it can be today for
our kids."

Those last three assertions are
quite startling discoveries. I think Dan Quayle said the same things four
years ago.

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